Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science (CMU SCS), a leading U.S. research university, needed to update its 15-year-old outdated applicant management system. The system was inflexible, difficult to maintain, and unable to meet evolving requirements.
Initially, the CMU SCS software engineering team was constrained by the typical binary choice of either an inflexible off-the-shelf system or a prolonged in-house build:
- Find an off-the-shelf system that might work for their unique requirements. But, this comes with limited customization options.
- Build a custom system from the ground up to ensure a perfect fit for SCS’s requirements. But SCS's modest team size and intricate legacy data structures would make this rebuild an endeavor that would take several months to a year to merely establish foundations.
Schema migration and APIs
The first phase of the rebuild project, and one of the most time consuming, regardless of the path, would be migrating CMU SCS’s vast trove of historical applicant data. What had seemed like it would be a months-long data migration slog became effortless and a non-issue with Amplication.
With the DB Schema Import feature, CMU SCS could now easily migrate existing legacy data into a new modern system. This feature delivered a speedy migration, and also drastically reduces future error correction due to the feature’s design, saving valuable developer resources.
Additionally, by using Amplication, the CMU SCS team successfully developed a comprehensive set of modern APIs over their existing database. They achieved this without any data loss and significantly reduced the duration of this phase from 12 months to just a few weeks.
Breaking the monolith
The next phase of the massive modernization project for CMU SCS's legacy applicant management system focuses on breaking down its monolithic architecture. Amplication’s data modeling and event brokering features enable CMU SCS to break their existing monolithic app and easily build a modern micro-services infrastructure.
Moreover, Amplication-generated code is fully customizable, and gives CMU SCS’s team the flexibility they need to deliver those unique requirements without locking them into a rigid system.
Continuous collaboration
CMU SCS and Amplication continue to work closely together on the entire project, building their new applicant management system. Amplication provides close support through direct communication with the team to help CMU SCS make the most of the platform's capabilities, ensuring their project got built the right way.
Essentially, Amplication helps delivering a functioning backend in days rather than months. Developers can still further customize the generated code should CMU SCS’s requirements evolve again. The open communication ensures CMU SCS have expert guidance tailored to their modernization needs throughout all stages of the project.
CMU's results so far
By utilizing Amplication, CMU SCS benefit from:
- Accelerated development: the extended timeline shrinks considerably, ensuring a faster transition to a modern, efficient Applicant Management System.
- Error minimization: the industry best practices encapsulated within Amplication generated code significantly reduce the potential for errors and bug fixes, foreseeing a smoother operational future.
- Resource optimization: the streamlined process, facilitated by Amplication, optimizes the utilization of CMU's modest development team, avoiding the extensive training and handover sessions that a larger team deployment would have required.
Amplication's industry-leading capabilities accelerate CMU SCS's transition to an efficient, scalable applicant management system. This partnership exemplifies how tools like Amplication help modernize legacy systems and empower developers.
